Tom Tom the Piper's Son

This special edition of Jacobs' classic work Tom Tom the Piper's Son includes the two-hour film, which is recognized as a structuralist masterpiece, as well as A Tom Tom Chaser (2002), Jacobs' never-before-seen poetic riff on the transformation of his film from chemical to electronic form during the telecine process.

Writes David Schwartz of the American Museum of the Moving Image: "Jacobs reveals film as a Frankenstein art. What is a movie but a celluloid corpse brought to life by the electrical spark of the projector? Rephotographing a 1905 Biograph one-reeler, Jacobs penetrates into the image, delving into each shot, zooming in on details, probing deeper and deeper... A journey into the abyss."

Ken Jacobs writes: "Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead... I wanted to 'bring to the surface' that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape... to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself — a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame, each cold still... stirred to life by a successive 16-24 frame-per-second pattering on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!) then collaborating, unknowingly and ironically, to form the always-poignant-because-always-past illusion. A movie about penetration to the sublime, to the infinite..."

The VHS (or 1/2") format editions also include a 214-page bilingual book. The publication is a special "Tom Tom" issue of Exploding, the French magazine of analysis in film experimentation, and includes articles by Xavier Baert, Nicole Brenez, Frédérique Devaux, Vincent Deville, Ken Jacobs, Emeric de Lastens, Loïg Le Bihan, Stéfani de Loppinot, Christophe Passemard, Emmanuel Siety.